This short course surveys all the major topics covered in a full semester MBA level finance course, but with a more intuitive approach on a very high conceptual level. The goal here is give you a roadmap and framework for how financial professional make decisions.
We will cover the basics of financial valuation, the time value of money, compounding returns, and discounting the future. You will understand discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation and how it compares to other methods. We also step inside the mind of a corporate financial manager and develop the basic tools of capital budgeting. We will survey the how, when, and where to spend money, make tradeoffs about investment, growth, dividends, and how to ensure sound fiscal discipline. Our journey then turns to a Wall Street or capital markets perspective of investments as we discuss the fundamental tradeoff between risk and return. We then synthesize our discussion of risk with our valuation framework and incorporate it into series of direct applications to practice.
This course requires no prior familiarity with finance. Rather, it is intended to be a first step for anyone who is curious about understanding stock markets, valuation, or corporate finance. We will walk through all of the tools and quantitative analysis together and develop a guide for understanding the seemingly complex decisions that finance professionals make.
By the end of the course, you will develop an understanding of the major conceptual levers that push and pull on financial decision making and how they relate to other areas of business. The course should also serve as a roadmap for where to further your finance education and it would be an excellent introduction of any students contemplating an MBA or Finance concentration, but who has little background in the area.

MH

This course as the title suggests is actually required for non finance professionals to get an understanding of concepts in Finance. A very good and well structured course.

AH

Nov 12, 2017

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I would like to thank you for this amazing course, it is very helpful for non-finance and financial people at the same time. I believe it will help me in my career.

Из урока

How Much Does Money Cost? Evaluating the Cost of Capital

Welcome back everyone! In our final week together in this course, we switch gears and take an external view of the firm from a Wall Street, or capital markets, perspective. We think about the basic tradeoff between risk and return, how to measure risk, and how to put a risk premium on different kinds of investments. We then take our analysis of risk and return and use it to estimate a firm's cost of capital. Finally, we circle back to free cash flows, capital budgeting and valuation to tie together all four weeks and get ready for our capstone case analysis.

Преподаватели

James Weston

Houston Endowment Professor of Finance

Текст видео

JAMES WESTON: Hi, welcome back to Finance for Non-Finance Professionals. This week, we're going to be talking about the cost of capital. How much it cost how much it costs a firm to raise money or how much the firm should be discounting future cash flows. The first three weeks we've been doing a lot of discounting and compounding and talking about rates of return, but we haven't actually talked about where that rate of return comes from, what discount rate should we use for different kinds of firms with different risks. This week, we're going to spend all talking about that r, that discount rate, that cost of capital. So we're first going to talk about the difference between different kinds of capital. We're going to talk about debt capital versus capital. We're going to use that to talk about the cost of equity as different from the cost of debt, those two sources of capital have different discount rates as it turns out, because of their differences in risk. We're going to then put and debt together into the weighted average cost of capital, which is really the firm, the overall firm's discount rate. How risky is the firm overall once we sort of blend its debt financing with its equity financing, what we call its capital structure, how risky is the firm overall? We'll come up with the firm's overall discount rate, the weighted average cost of capital. Then we'll go back and put it all together. At the end of week 4 we'll have finished most of our lessons, and it's going to be time to take that weighted average cost of capital, put it back together with free cash flow analysis, use that to do the capital budgeting stuff that we talked about in week two, and come on back around to discounting and compounding in weak one. So this week is really sort of the capstone of putting it all back together. All the discounting and compounding and free cash flow analysis, now putting that together with where discount rates come from. And we'll have wrapped up our session of Finance for Non-Finance Professionals.